


the consequence a life requires

by shai



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Canon-Typical Tragedy, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, but the other way around, canon-typical gay feelings, what if that terrible thing that happens at the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:21:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23069164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shai/pseuds/shai
Summary: "Do you trust me, Nav?""Course not." Gideon says, eyes flicking over to Camilla's desperate last stand. "What's the plan?"
Comments: 7
Kudos: 48





	the consequence a life requires

They're screwed. Camilla's down, Harrow's crumpled to a barely-conscious heap on Gideon's lap. Gideon's trying to feel for a pulse while keeping her sword arm free, and Cytherea is advancing inexorably.

Gideon isn't one to put herself down, but she's gotta be honest: she's got... extremely low confidence in her ability to put this right. Her knee's extremely messed up, being flung from a great height by a skeleton monster's done some weird things to her balance, she's overall just not in tip top fighting form.

She'll fight if she can, but given Ianthe couldn't hold up in the face of Cytherea even with all her new-found cannibal-murderer power it's hard to imagine she and her six-day-long sleep deficit are going to pull a victory out at the last minute. Damn if she's going to roll over and play dead, though. What's Cytherea going to do, kill her twice? She'll do her best to hold the ground until the brains of the operation wakes up.

So Gideon reaches for her sword and starts to stand as the Lyctor bears down on her and her unconscious idiot of a necromancer, only to stumble as her knee falls out from under her.

Cytherea stalks right in close, looking down at her and Harrow with a kind of blithe curiosity. It's kind of a mindfuck: evil though she is, Gideon's spent so many afternoons waiting on and tending to that fragile body. Cytherea up close is so clearly made of all the details Gideon pined after in Dulcinea. All kinds of idiot caring impulses rise up in her unwanted, and combined with all her newly revealed poise and ruthless confidence it sparks... well, 'hot scary swordswoman getting up in my personal space' is a fantasy Gideon's dwelled on before, that's all she's saying.

The former object of her misplaced affections smiles at her with an ever-so-genuine-looking softness and says: "Step away, sweet. I told you already you'll live through this, but there's better and worse ways of living."

"Go fuck yourself," Gideon says, fingers tightening around Harrow's shoulder.

To her left and behind her, Camilla lurches to her feet. Cytherea's chin tilts up, mouth twitches in a scornful little twist for a moment. Then her face clears and she raises her sword.

"Take her and run, Ninth." Camilla says, then charges forward.

Gideon's eyes are burning and she can't tell if it's tears or anger. She rolls Harrow's limp body over, ready to hoist her over her shoulder, but Harrow reaches out and takes hold of her forearm.

"Do you trust me, Nav?"

"Course not." Gideon says, eyes flicking over to Camilla's desperate last stand. "What's the plan?"

Harrow laughs, which is a grim sound at the best of times. Her dark eyes wide with panic, Gideon's liege-lord grabs her by the shoulders. One of her hands has no grip strength at all but leaves Gideon's collarbone wet with what must be blood; the other holds on with manic strength, each fingertip digging in deep enough to hurt.

Harrow... kisses her, lips stained with blood and smudged paint, deeper and more aggressive than Gideon would have expected. They stare at one another, Gideon like a deer in the headlights, Harrow's eyes bright and manic and desperate.

Gideon swallows. There's a small sound of pain from behind them: Camilla, fighting to buy them these precious moments. "What's the plan, my shadowy queen?"

"Fight her." Harrow lifts the necklace of vertebrae from around her neck and loops it over Gideon's head. Gideon finds herself ducking her head to make this transfer easier and is briefly confused at herself: this whole cooperating-with-her-childhood-nemesis thing really has become second nature. "Just like we did earlier. I'll help."

"Not doubting you boss, but I'd need -" They both flinch at the sound of a cut off scream. Her eyes dart sideways. Camilla's right arm is hanging useless at her side. There's a spear of bone pinned through her left shoulder, too.

"A lot of help," Harrow says, crisp and matter of fact as if she isn't a second away from passing out. "Keep it together, Griddle."

She lifts a hand to Gideon's forehead and holds it there a moment, and it seems like the kind of badly timed sentimental moment people are always putting the world on hold for in comics until Gideon registers how pale around the cheeks her idiot liege is going, and how in contrast she herself is no longer feeling five seconds of hard exertion away from passing out. She opens her mouth to protest ("are you reverse vampirising me, my idiot witch-queen?") and gets cut off by "Get up. Rescue the Sixth."

As if on cue, Camilla makes a horrible choking sound. And Gideon likes the Sixth, damnit, so she picks up her longsword again and gets ready to jump into the fray.

There's weird sunspot-looking patches in her vision. Harrow in her brain, probably, but she can't tell how or why; they're not focused like they had been in the fight against the construct. Camilla's been impaled through the shoulder for the second time today, this time more nastily: Cytherea's rapier goes straight in one side and out the other, the Lyctor in close and saying some stupid taunt, the cav's own blade on the ground. Gideon has emotions about this for about a quarter of a second before the tactical bit of her mind overrules them and just finds it useful that her opponent's blade is trapped: she cleaves down with her own much heavier sword and cuts deep into Cytherea's collarbone.

The blow connects, but fighting Cytherea isn't like fighting a regular human: the Lyctor shrugs off being cut to the bone and pivots to land a horrifyingly strong kick to Gideon's ribs. It knocks her back a full three meters, vision blacking out from the impact; there's a kind of intangible mental sharp-drawing-in-of-breath that she's pretty sure is Harrow suffering alongside her but desperately trying not to be distracting.

It turns into a dirty brawl, Gideon bringing all her ferocity and cunning to bear and just barely holding up. The sense of Harrow hovering over her shoulder stays strong but doesn't push her into any actions the way it had before. Everything narrows to how to survive her next attack. Cytherea must be badly hurt for Gideon to be able to keep up for even thirty seconds, but every attack that connects feels like it's a hairs-breadth away from breaking a bone.

Eventually, she lands a hit that would have ended a fight with anyone else, cutting Cytherea's face to the bone. The wordless communication that is Harrow's-intention pulls into focus as it hadn't before: Gideon obeys, touching a hand to that tooth necklace, drawing a pattern in her mind - bone grows out from Cytherea's exposed jaw - Gideon can see its trajectory and intention, it will grow up and smother Cytherea's face.

Cytherea draws her free hand over the cut, smooth skin growing over it, and raises both eyebrows.

 _Keep pushing_ , Harrow demands in what would be a snarl if it was spoken language, and Gideon charges and Harrow gets her to palm a knucklebone that was for some reason hidden in her sleeve and that she somehow impossibly knows how to weave into a moving being again, and she has an inkling for how to tweak her adept's mental schematic (how does she know them before they happen, when did Harrow learn to channel this through her?) to give the skeleton a sword just like her sword, and a set of rules that should make it capable of some of her tricks for sparring.

Cytherea feints left to hide an attack with her off hand; it lands, but Gideon muscles through the pain with the sheer momentum of her longsword drive her back against the very edge of the roof; the second skeleton they pulled from the ground has crept up and chooses this moment to sweep her legs.

Cytherea grins, vicious, even as Gideon drives her feet back off the roof to hang in the open air, lets Gideon's strike past her guard to slice deep into her stomach and uses that move in to catch Gideon's sword arm and pin the blade between the two of them as the Lyctor hangs her whole bodyweight from her foe. She is too close and too smug: there's a slow smile growing on her face and a tone to her voice like she's letting this poor backwoods brute into a secret.

"Have you figured out yet what that sneaky little bitch did?"

Now, see, Gideon's come to resent anyone other than herself using such words about Harrow, so the first reaction the question sparks is simple outrage at the word bitch. The only reason it doesn't translate directly into violence is that she's also still shitting herself a bit at being in so close to this ancient creature and trying to figure out why Cytherea's gone for something closer to an embrace than a stranglehold, and with all that taken together, she doesn't actually parse the question as a question until Cytherea says "Welcome, new sister," and lets go.

* * *

Gideon reacts very gracefully to abruptly no longer being in a fight she'd expected to die in: she stumbles the fuck over trying to correct her balance, and then she makes a kind of weird scream of alarm and rushes to where her adept is crumpled in a heap.

Harrow Nonagesimus looks... bad. Limp, but her eyes are open. Gideon picks her up and shakes her, and when that makes her head fall back on her neck in a very bad way she swears under her breath and tries to remember the safe way to arrange an unconscious person and settles for just arranging Harrow on her back and putting a finger to her neck to try and find any evidence she's breathing.

There is none. Gideon slowly becomes aware of Camilla, sat against a wall, watching her.

New sister. Huh. She looks up at the other cavalier and can't think of a single word to say.

"Ninth." Camilla says. Then, after some consideration. "I apologise."

Gideon can't help but laugh, the cavalier who'd got up while completely broken and flung herself into a sword to buy them time. "Don't we all."

Camilla glares at her. "I let Nonagesimus kill herself. I wasn't sure if she'd really be able to transform you, but it seemed likely to make more of a difference than the three of us each breaking ourselves on a foe who outmatched us."

The cavalier of the Sixth looks defiant, and sad, and a little afraid. Gideon closes her eyes for a moment, and can't help but notice her knee isn't fucked up any more, and that in that odd proprioceptive sense that showed up when Harrow was riding piggy-back on her awareness, there's a sense of where the skeleton she'd/Harrow'd summoned to trip Cytherea is still standing.

Hard to deny that that one isn't an original flavour Gideon Nav skill, or her necromancer sure doesn't seem to be in any state to be tampering with her mind right now.

She opens her eyes and Harrow - Harrow's body - is still there, and Camilla is still watching her, wary, waiting for a response.

"Sixth," says Gideon, voice hoarse at the realisation she'll have to acknowledge the event: "Fuck Harrow for leaving me here, but you couldn't have stopped her if you'd wanted."

And they sit with there with their ghosts for a while, covered in blood and dust.

**Author's Note:**

> I love these gay idiots, and I read the Climatic Final Showdown on a bus journey that finished just before Gideon makes her own tragic self-sacrificing decision, so I wrote this version in my head on the walk home before finding out what really happened.
> 
> Here, internet, have a Gideon who is about to be fucking outraged Harrow'd die and leave her the obligation to go home and fix things.
> 
> Title from the poem Missing Dates, by William Empsom, which felt appropriately morbid https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/missing-dates/


End file.
